Page 103 of The Book That Held Her Heart

“Look at you both,” Anne said brightly. “I never realised quite how young you were, Kerrol. You seemed terribly grown-up to me back when I was sixteen. And look at you now, just a boy, with your whole life before you. I do hope you use it well. And Yute, still so handsome, still so serious.”

“You could come with us this time,” Yute said gently.

“There are wonders to see!” Kerrol hadn’t thought of taking Anne back with them. “So many worlds and times.”

Anne squeezed his hand. “You came to see me. That’s a wonder in itself. And one thing I’ve found over the years, is that if you stay in one spot long enough, and pay close attention, you’ll find that there’s magic everywhere.”

Yute nodded in surprise as if he had observed the same thing himself, though it had taken him longer to discover that truth. “To be honest, Anne, I didn’t come here with high hopes of finding you. I thought we would find a wasteland, still burning with the fires of your war.”

“You saw that?” Anne blinked her own surprise. “But you left almost a year before it started.”

“I felt it coming.” Yute shivered. “Your world then looked close to discovering fire.”

“Of course they had fire.” Kerrol frowned. “We saw it!”

“I mean the second kind, the burning of star dust. ‘Fission’ they call it.” Yute shaped his mouth around the unfamiliar word. “To look around this city now I can’t believe you don’t have the third kind.” He glanced at Kerrol, then at Mayland, his gaze lingering. “The burning of star fuel. Fusion. That’s a fire that will make dust of whole civilisations in a single day.” He returned his attention to Anne. “So, I’m extremely glad to find you alive and well.” He patted her hand. “And also surprised. Will you tell me all about it? If you have time?”

And she did.

They sat awhile on the bench as the shadows stretched and the children came out to play then returned to their classes. Anne talked, Yute asked questions, Kerrol listened and from time to time clenched his teeth together tightly to keep back the growls, the snarls, and the howling that Anne’s story wanted to draw out of him.

Mayland watched in silence, his dark eyes wide and unblinking, rumbling only when she spoke of the camps and the children and the gas.

“And so you come and talk to the children, to ensure that this terror is not forgotten.” Mayland was first to speak when at last Anne fell silent.

She nodded. “We humans are very good at forgetting uncomfortable truths.”

“And you think this particular truth should be kept forever. Held in books in the library.” Mayland didn’t voice it as a question, and Kerrol could hear his tone hardening. He could read the distrust on his brother’s face, the feeling that he had been walked into a trap of some kind.

Anne looked at Mayland closely, tilting her head slightly, the old intelligence still in her dark eyes. “I hope there will be a time when mankind reaches a point when it can forget such things. As any mother wants her children to forget the fears that torment them. But that time is not now.” She smiled, though Kerrol didn’t know how after the story she had told them. He assumed she had been gentler with the children or surely they would have been crying and running home to their parents. Unless human young were much sturdier than he imagined. “When you speak of the library, Mayland, I think you must be imagining the library your brother and Yute have spoken of. We don’t have that here. We have many libraries, big and small. Most of our books are in people’s homes, or on the shelves of shops like my own.”

“The library will find you,” Mayland said. “Perhaps in the ashes when all this is gone. Holding your books for you, and many others, eternal, unchanging. All sacrifice recorded and kept, all horrors endlessly repopulating the shelves no matter how many times the fire purges them.”

“Goodness.” Anne watched him closely. “I’m all for thwarting the book burners, young man, but I’ve always been uneasy with the idea of any one person or any one system reigning supreme. What if it’s the wrong one? Who sets these rules for everyone else?” She shook her head. “No, what we have is far from perfect. I don’t believe there is a perfect, not in this life. But its strength is in diversity. Its strength, curiously, is in its biases, which lean in every direction. Its strength is in many systems, many ways, the curation of many and varied hands. Whatever hits us, something survives. We adapt, we change, and with god’s blessing, we get better. It’s hard to become so exercised over what the right answer is when you can have many answers. If you don’t like how I run my bookshop, you can take your business across the street, or start your own.”

Mayland bowed his head in thought before his next question, and this time it really was a question. Anne gave her thoughts on it, and the next one, a tiny old human chatting to a canith as tall as her when sitting, in theplayground of a school to a background of screams and shouts and the wildness of children.

When the school emptied, they let the tide take them too, returning to Anne’s home. She lived above Madame Orlova’s bookshop, which she now owned, and which her grandson had recently taken over running from her daughter. She served them little cakes in the kitchen at the back.

“The books that were banned are no longer banned. We sell all sorts. You would hardly believe the fiction today.” She snorted. “But you can read about Helen Keller too. Madame Orlova would approve, I think. Those nice boys from Weber’s too, they write about…they call them gay now, yes? I can’t remember their names anymore…” Anne looked distressed. “They never came back.”

“Herman and Carl,” Kerrol said. It had only been yesterday. But like Anne’s family they had been taken to murder camps and…murdered.

“Yes, that was it. Herman and Carl.” Anne closed her eyes as if seeing them again. As if Kerrol had given her a gift. “Thank you.” She paused. “Ihavegrown old, haven’t I? It comes to us all, I suppose. Now, where was I? Another cake, Mayland? And one for you, Kerrol?”

“Thank you.” He took the tiny, delicious cake and held it close to his heart, and understood why the laws of time should not be broken.

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,

The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere

The ceremony of innocence is drowned.

“The Second Coming,” by William Butler Yeats

Chapter 47

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